It was surprisingly like the tale of Noah’s Ark, I thought to myself, after learning how around 1,000 sea turtles had been saved in a small bay in the Florida Panhandle during a cold snap last month.
The analogy is far from precise, of course, but the enduring appeal of animal tales, and especially stories of animal rescues, to journalists and readers alike, can be seen even in the flawed comparison.
At our most elemental level, we humans seem to need an occasional escape into the wild and a chance to remind ourselves that we are, in fact, a part of it. That might go double for today’s journalists. In the past year, I’ve written about a half-dozen articles that involve animals. That’s a happy accident, though not all the stories have a happy ending.
We aren’t able to know exactly what animals are thinking or feeling, but we like to believe we can at least tell when they are suffering or feel that their lives are threatened, and we tend to want to know about it.
In Scotland, two endangered red pandas at the Edinburgh Zoo died within six days of each other in early November. That alone is noteworthy. But what made it more startling was that zookeepers thought it was human behavior — the noise of continual fireworks — that had killed the mother and infant daughter.
Over one million people signed a public petition calling for tighter controls in Britain on the extensive fireworks displays that are a trademark of Bonfire Night, an annual celebration on Nov. 5.
In late December, I learned of the travails of another endangered animal, the Southern Resident killer whale. This one would strike readers as particularly poignant because it involved a grieving mother, one The New York Times had written about years ago.
Just as she was in 2018, when she spent 17 days carrying a dead calf, the orca, Tahlequah, was found clinging to a carcass, holding fast to a female calf before the Puget Sound waves swept it away from her.
Even given how smart we know the orca to be, this was a breathtaking, heartbreaking and extraordinarily exhausting ritual to contemplate. But marine biologists were not at all surprised by her behavior.
“We have the same neurotransmitters that they have,” said Joe Gaydos, the science director of the SeaDoc Society at the University of California, Davis. “We have the same hormones that they have. Why shouldn’t we also have the emotions that they have? We don’t have the market cornered on emotions. So I think it’s fair to say that she is grieving or mourning.”
Humans have also had a hand in the decline of these orcas by generating noise pollution from ships and boats that invades their habitat and toxic pollutants that make their way up the food chain.
I tend to ask many questions of scientists when writing animal stories like these because it helps me imagine what another living, breathing creature is experiencing and draw out the more relatable aspects.
The pain of losing female pandas and orcas was particularly acute for the scientists I interviewed, because the females can grow up to give birth, helping to ease the dwindling numbers of their populations.
Human ingenuity can be marshaled to help animals, too. The rescuers can be every bit as compelling as the rescued.
Last month, in the vast forests of the Adirondacks in northern New York, some fast-thinking forest rangers and environmental conservation officers rescued a 1,000-pound moose that had gotten itself stuck in a partially frozen lake. Luckily for the moose, it was spotted by a passer-by.
The rescuers could have waited for an airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, that was on its way to help, but they were aware that every minute mattered.
They spoke about their rescue as if it was all in a day’s work, as if almost anyone would don cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chain saws, as the team had done.
The moose remained astonishingly calm throughout the ordeal, which I found striking, and the rescuers were able to help guide it ashore, where it ambled off into the woods.
The moose rescue took less than an afternoon. In Florida late last month, government agencies and dozens of volunteers toiled for over six days to save about 1,000 sea turtles. It was among Florida’s largest cold-water rescues of turtles in the last 15 years.
Like other Floridians, the sea turtles were caught off guard by the wintry weather and couldn’t escape the plunging water temperatures of St. Joseph Bay, on the Panhandle. I opened my article with these lines: “Their flippers were paralyzed, they couldn’t come up for air, and their heartbeats were barely perceptible. But most of these 1,200 sea turtles were lucky. The wind and currents had carried their motionless bodies ashore, where, at least, they could be found.”
The government workers and the many volunteers became master animal movers, using a brigade of boats, buckets, crates and trucks as their “land ark.” They brought the endangered sea turtles to the Gulf World Marine Institute, where they received medical examinations and recuperated in giant saltwater tanks before being returned to the bay once the waters warmed up again.
It was a mostly happy ending about beautiful animals. That beauty is also why we return again and again to telling these stories.
The post Reporter Gone Wild appeared first on New York Times.
